Complex Reaction Kinetics in Chemistry: A unified picture suggested by Mechanics in Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores the structural similarities between chemical reaction kinetics and classical mechanics, proposing a unified framework to better understand complex biochemical pathways and cooperative reaction behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analogy between chemical kinetics and physics mechanics, applying physical methods to analyze complex biochemical reaction patterns.

Findings

Identifies structural parallels between reaction kinetics and mechanics.

Provides insights into complex cooperative reaction behaviors.

Suggests a unified mathematical framework for biochemical reactions.

Abstract

Complex biochemical pathways or regulatory enzyme kinetics can be reduced to chains of elementary reactions, which can be described in terms of chemical kinetics. This discipline provides a set of tools for quantifying and understanding the dialogue between reactants, whose framing into a solid and consistent mathematical description is of pivotal importance in the growing field of biotechnology. Among the elementary reactions so far extensively investigated, we recall the socalled Michaelis-Menten scheme and the Hill positive-cooperative kinetics, which apply to molecular binding and are characterized by the absence and the presence, respectively, of cooperative interactions between binding sites, giving rise to qualitative different phenomenologies. However, there is evidence of reactions displaying a more complex, and by far less understood, pattern: these follow the positive-cooperative scenario at small substrate concentration, yet negative-cooperative effects emerge and get stronger as the substrate concentration is increased. In this paper we analyze the structural analogy between the mathematical backbone of (classical) reaction kinetics in Chemistry and that of (classical) mechanics in Physics: techniques and results from the latter shall be used to infer properties on the former.